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Historical Variability in Heritable General Intelligence: Its Evolutionary Origins and Socio-Cultural Consequences

Published May 2013

“Woodley and Figueredo have written a stunning monograph proposing that selection on intelligence within and between human groups works in opposing directions. Between group competition, especially in the context of hard times, favors groups with high genotypic IQ, especially innovators with IQs beyond 140 or so. Easier times relax this selection within groups leading to genotype IQ decline. They also propose that IQ responds to environmental change, the well-known “Lynn-Flynn effect”, but that these changes are not changes in genotypic IQ. They test their hypothesis with historical data on innovations in science and elsewhere.

They paint with a broad stroke, refreshing in a work on IQ. We are forced to think about, for example, the ecology of Europe during the “little ice age” and its consequences for cognitive evolution. They work firmly in a tradition with people like W.D. Hamilton, Gregory Clark, Richard Lynn, and many others.